"The best photographs are like bottled lightning, capturing an extraordinary, unrepeatable moment."

"[Writing] akes a long time.  There is no rushing it, and the work exists on its own timetable, outside of your own personal deadlines."

"When we show our work too soon, we are abdicating authority over it. Certainly there comes a point where we need a fresh eye, but until we have done all we can do, we jeopardize our relationship to our initial impulse."

"My books are always a process of discovery.  I almost never have any idea what I'm doing until I'm actually doing it.  In fact, I think every time I've had a plan or an idea, it has been entirely sidelined by whatever I uncover while writing."

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.  Plot is observed after the fact rather than before.  It cannot precede action.  It is the chart that remains when an action is through.  That is all Plot ever should be.  It is human desire let run, running, and reach a goal.  It cannot be mechanical.  It can only be dynamic."

"Sometimes, in our creative frenzy, we were not even conscious of what we were writing."

"We never want to force our story into our idea of how it should be structured. Our original impulse was valid. We can trust it and return to it over and over again, even as the story continues to be reshaped."

"It's like the Japanese with the garden.  Nature is doing all this stuff, and all they do is maybe take a branch and trim it, impose their will on it, and make it grow a certain way.  And they prune, and they keep certain things out.  But the plants are doing most of the work.  It's a two-way street–nature and man working together.  And in painting, the paint has got a texture and it sort of wants to be a certain way.  And a brush is so artificial, and it makes tiny little lines.  After you make a whole bunch of brush strokes, it's something else.  It's not the paint talking, it's too much of the person.  So you've gotta let accidents and strange things happen—let it work, so it's got an organic sort of quality."

"Stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do."

"I often start something and have no idea how it'll end.  The sense of surprise there, to me, is like magic every time." 

"That's what it’s like when you're creating things. On the one hand, it really seems like you're keeping it all moving on your own, and you can tell yourself that you've got inspiration raining down on you, but ultimately you can't make anything happen on your own."

"The same way that a photographer is not fully conscious of why she snaps the picture, there is a similar experience for writers. We are attempting to capture something on the page, a fleeting thought, an experience that we can not quite articulate, an idea that we do not quite understand, and by placing these moments in the context of a story, these experiences can be transmitted to our reader as something larger than we are, something beyond our limited understanding."

"They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. [Athletes] call it muscle memory. But for you [the artist], it's not muscle memory; it's dream space, it's sense memory."

"When I drew, I lost myself in it and stopped thinking about everything else; it was like creating another world for myself, a world with the things I wanted to see and do.  Thank God I had that."

"There are poems you write that are so on the edge they could go either way, especially when you take a very big risk."

"Real storytelling happens when writers forget the 'rule book' and write to the characters. They get inside the people in the story and experience the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and they let the reactions of the characters drive the incidents of the story."

"Although technology saves us time, it takes away mental space. Back when we had to do more tasks by hand, these tasks took longer to do, and while we did them, we had more time to think, daydream, or not-think."

"When I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before."

"The Interview Fallacy [is] the fraudulent claim that the artist always knew what he was doing and how he was doing it and can explain the whole business judiciously later when the fires of the work have cooled." (artist)

"It wasn't fantasy, but there was just something... like, I'd paint a still life but the colors wouldn't be quite like you'd expect them to be.  That's the magic of it, and I love it—the world building that occurs on the canvas as it does on the page."

"The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment–to put things down without deliberation–without worrying about their style–without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote—wrote, wrote ... By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught." (artist)

"A mysterious force has been guiding us, and when we trust this, we connect to the aliveness of our story."

"DON'T THINK.  Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity."

"Time-based work doesn't make as much sense as it once did, as ideas are not 'things' and can't be measured in units. An idea, conceived in just a moment, can have enormous implications. Thus an 'idea person' has a more flexible approach to time. She learns how to develop the special, and often quite eccentric, circumstances that encourage creativity, and to trust inspiration when it appears—no matter what the time. "

"I usually don't have a preconceived notion of what I'm going to create.  Most of the time I sketch with no goal or objective.  My hand will draw something and then it reveals itself to me."

"I don't know quite how the story will unfold.  I never write to a plan—but somehow, I know that I've 'seen' the entire book flash across my mind's eye like a speeded-up movie.  My process is to slow it all down, to start at Chapter 1 and write down what I see, scene by scene."

"As long as I'm in that 'zone,' I'm happy enough whether I've written 700 words or, like one crazy day writing The Turning Point, 7,000."

"I really don't think about my readers when I write—I am utterly at the beck and call of my characters and so absorbed in the world of their story that it becomes my reality."

"That's what I want for you! To surprise yourself, not know what you're going to do next, what you're going to write next."

"Listen to the story being told.  Come up with the idea, but let it play out naturally.  Try not to shape it word for word or be so married to an outline that you deny what could become something amazing."

"To allow yourself that space is, I think, the nub of creativity.  It's also scary and risky, because you're building a house with no real blueprint, driving without a map, never quite sure where the hell you're going."

"Frost said, 'No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.'  If you're not discovering, your words will die on the page."

"I was a real outliner... the real price was, the writing was always boring, because I had already mapped out what I was going to say.  There was no energy left, and no excitement left in the prose itself."

"I want to be able to express all the currents that flow inside me.  To have that agility to reach a state of otherness and yet express my own internal truth at the same time."

"The way someone washes the dishes reveals the quality of his or her poetry."

"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

"A story finds its own proper way of announcing itself."

"To be an artist means never to avert your eyes."

"I think there's a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book.  Let the book tell you.  And when it does, send only to places that put out the books you can't live without."

"This business of being a writer is ultimately about asking yourself: How alive am I willing to be?"

"The discipline of the writer is to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him."

"My best stories are the ones that don't feel entirely mine.  When I read them, I'm not sure how I wrote them."

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

"Every artist in the world fights this battle every day. To go to a scary place that makes some other part of you say: What are you doing? No. Just no. No. No.  The only way to create a work of literary art is to stop that voice. Your total attention needs to be on the sensual flow of experience from the unconscious."

"When you're finally in it—this is the part I really like—the writing just writes itself, it really does, and you're eager to get back to the work.  It's like reading a good book except you're writing it."

"When it comes to the voice, if I'm consciously doing anything, I'm probably doing something wrong. ...There does need to come a time when you just have to let it fly."

"I try to write the first draft very quickly.  I don't write the end.  I don't write the last quarter.  So I write my draft.  And then ... my next draft is usually cleaning it up and seeing what's there: 'What do we have here?'"

"There is sort of some type of structure even though you're flying by the seat of your pants with duct tape and spit.  I always have an idea of where I'd like the story to go, where I think I might end up, though that could change.  It depends on you exercising your full imagination.  Daydreaming a lot.  Sensing what possibilities are out there.  Not being afraid to change your mind on something." (artist)

"In every character I write, there's a little piece of me.  And they're all interesting to me, enough that I would write a book about them ... It's exciting to imagine being different people."

"To write historical fiction of any kind—short stories or not—you need to be able to close your eyes and have the past blaze up around you."

"It's this funny headspace you get in, where you're acting, really.  ....  You literally pretend you are this person, and you go about your life as if you are this person.  And so, when people will ask me, 'Did you like this character?' I don't know.  Because I'm so far inside them, I can't judge them at all.  You're behaving as if you are this person."

"We want the art, that's what we're aiming for.  We're aiming to suppress our cautious editor who always tells what to do.  I think one of the big writers said, 'Write drunk, edit sober.'  I say: Write fat, edit lean.  In that first draft, put all the extra stuff in, anything that comes into your head.  What happens is we self-edit as we're writing—Oh, that's not going to make it in the final.  Don't worry about that.  Put it in.  It's going to add flavor, and it's going to inform the text.  Once you're done with that, then go through and put it on a diet.  You know, we want a fat baby.  They've got the chubby cheeks, the chubby arms, the chubby fingers—we love that!  That's good.  When the baby grows up, then we want the lean muscle."

"No amount of knowledge or tenacity or craftsmanship can substitute for the alchemy of working on the right project at the right time."

"I don't think we should discuss ideas.  I think we should just write, and then go in with the book and say, 'here's the book.'  Now, sometimes you have to say something.  But I wouldn't listen to what they say back—because they're not prophets. ... Agents particularly are really not in the business of being prophetic.  They know what has worked, and that's it."

"I don't think about publishing books, or even my "poetry" in general, when I'm working.  I think in terms of one poem at a time.  The poem I'm writing always requires more attention than the poems I've written."